In yet another example of me stealing ideas from one of my favorite blogs (Though I would prefer mine evoke Seinfeld imagery), here’s a poem that I found in the front of a notebook from my senior year of high school. I would date it March 2006.
Visitors to the “About” portion of this blog may have noticed a comment (two actually) from one of my favorite teachers ever, Mrs. Green.
In it, she mentions that she has a Ty Johnson original work about a student-teacher. Well, I found it in its original, pencil-print form:
A textbook tool of the queerest sort, Phony past a fault and stubborn more. You are impressed by all and know nothing, Of knowledge or self, Agree with everyone. Your anxiety shows your ignorance fully and leaves, no indications of knowledge beyond sense to breathe, and speak. Speak not so I may imagine you gone to the diamond, Come back cynicism! For I long to be challenged again, He murders poetry! and dances in the ruins of art, with a sterile mind.
The student-teacher in question was a baseball player, hence the diamond reference. Mrs. Green was always very cynical, hence her being homaged by cynicism itself.
I have nothing else to say except that reading this poem today caused me to laugh hysterically and run to the computer to transcribe it and share it with you.
It began a couple of months ago when I was talking to my mom about how I want to eat healthier.
I wanted a single, concrete way to feel that I had accomplished something and I decided I wanted it to be something I could give up. That’s when I came up with a “No-McDonald’s” plan.
It was easy enough. There are other fast food options out there if I needed a quick bite, but McDonald’s…I don’t know, have you ever just smelled a bag of that food? It smells like garbage juice, my dad’s affectionate term for the liquid that always seems to leak from trash bags.
I figured I would start weaning myself off of Mickey D’s during the final month of 2010 and then 2011 would fly by no problem. No worries, right? Wrong.
With the McRib back from its 2-year absence, I feel powerless against those arches. I hate it, but I have to embrace the McRib while it’s around. It’s a survival trait I’ve picked up over years of McRibs rotating on and off of the menu at that disgustingly gross restaurant.
So…new resolution: no sodas. This will help me out immensely! Between drinking sodas, beer and whatever else I can get my hands on to keep my liver busy, giving up sodas would give me a lease on my health, letting me at least FEEL like I’m making a single healthy choice even as I pursue my Flying Saucer immortality.
But I forgot and had a soda with lunch on New Year’s Day.
In fact, the only thing I’ve managed to remain consistent with in 2011 has been drinking some form of alcohol every night. Maybe that’s the way to go…365 days of alcoholic consumption? At least I wouldn’t be doing it in 2012 (It’s a leap year).
So now I’m contemplating a 25/25/12.5 plan, whereby I’ll do 25 hours of volunteer work, read 25 books and lose 12.5 pounds. Then, again, I could learn a new language…like American sign language or French. Why? Well because using fake sign language (as I often do) is offensive to people who know deaf people. Trust me, that was the final thing I learned in 2010.
But in the end, I’ve decided none of it really matters. I’ve gotten at least one year older every year since I learned to count, so that’s an accomplishment. I mean, it’s no Sharapova, but it’s something.
Which makes me wonder: Maybe our lives shouldn’t be constrained to calendar years, but we should look at the bigger picture. Why be vegan for a year when you could just be healthy for a lifetime? Why not try to limit my McRibs while learning survival French and enough sign language to ask what someone’s name is when I’m in a socially awkward situation?
Boom. I just blew your mind.
2011 is going to be awesome. It better, because it may be our last full year left.
But think about it…isn’t that how we should live every year?
What are your resolutions…not just for this year, but for this life?
Editor’s Note: I’m no political scientist and I’m hardly a historian. I don’t pretend to have any answers. What I present here is simply something to consider as you scan the headlines of today’s news-aggregating media…or newspapers for a few of my friends out there. It is an embarrassingly brief synopsis of the French Revolution juxtaposed with today’s governmental crises. I only argue that the connections are clear from a historical perspective and seem to present a nice literary narrative.
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Read this for starters: There Will Be Blood
Mmm…more academic talk.
So in my nine semesters at N.C. State, I’ve been in and out of a lot of history courses.
Some of them I passed with no problems, while others (like the one on modern Russia) have been struggles leaving me wondering whether or not I’ve even learned anything.
Generally I come away with a broader understanding of a culture and historical perspective for the sake of understanding other history topics that I’m already well-versed in. For instance, I didn’t glean much of an understanding about all of the revolutions that befell the Russian state in my class on the U.S.S.R., but I did gather a new perspective on World War II.
There we go. Now that you understand that I learn without really learning, I can move to a juicy little nugget that came up in my France in the Ancient Regime class over the past few weeks.
(For my less-than-avid followers, the following will look a lot like a history lecture/analysis. Please skip down to my conclusion, marked roughly with an *).
France had no representative government in the centuries before the French Revolution, and instead held what was known as an Estates General in which the three Estates (the classes of the population) gathered to discuss taxes and such.
The first estate was the clergy, the second was the knights/nobles and the third was, well everyone else.
It worked out okay (according to the top two estates) because each estate only got one vote, meaning when the nobles and clergy wanted tax exemptions for the nobles and clergy, they steamrolled the third estate’s vote 2 to 1 every time.
The Estates General was something the king called…if he wanted to. Because of this, France went from 1614 to 1788 without ever calling one – that’s 174* years. (Not 114 as originally reported. Thanks Farrell). Imagine two generations of third estaters living and dying without ever having a voice in the government that was taxing them.
Now take into account the numerous wars France underwent in that time (Yeah, the American Revolution as well, if you can call it that…which I’ll get to in a minute) and you find yourself with quite a government deficit.
You’re taxing the poor and fighting wars on more than one continent…then comes a famine and you’re looking down the barrel of a revolution the likes of which the world had never seen.
So because of all the negatives, King Louis XVI calls another Estates General to be run the same way as before, i.e. with a powerless third estate. They get pissed and ask for more power, but by the time XVI gives it to them, they’re irate.
The rest you probably know from history classes (assuming you didn’t go to Rosewood):
Finally, something almost as badass as me on a tennis court.
*I understand summing up the history of modern France in two lines of Wikipedia liks is a foolish way to make this point, but that Revolution in which French citizens beheaded their own king left a power vacuum that led to more terror, Napoleon and several more revolutions before stability was ever reached. (Arguably at the end of the 19th century or beginning of 20th century, though we all remember what happened to France in the 1940s…)
The wisdom from this revolution dictates that if the rulers of a country ignore the governed, revolution can come, and I’m not talking about a glorious “kick out the British” revolution…I mean a French-style revolution where the entire nation implodes and chaos reigns for decades…Think like a long-term Argentinean economy with some dictatorship thrown in for good measure.
Our political compass in the U.S. is so skewed…we think we’re a superpower and we always will be, but guess what? That’s how people felt in France and England and Germany in the early part of the 20th century and a war nearly bankrupt them all, leaving an upstart power (the U.S.) and a country that ignored human rights (U.S.S.R) to emerge as the powers in the world. Where is the U.S.S.R now?
The connections between our country’s current state and France’s are many, and I won’t make them all for you, but the tax cuts one just drives me up the wall.
The Bush tax cuts are exactly the type of tax agenda the clergy and nobles had for themselves in the 18th century and with people like Former Senator Alan Simpson running things, it seems like we’re bound for a scary revolution just like France.
Now, to clarify my thoughts on the matter: France’s revolution is today heralded as one of the greatest moments in Western civilization. It typically marks the beginning of the modern era for history and it’s one of the most badass moments in history as far as I’m concerned. Any country that would rather rip itself to shreds than be ruled by an oblivious monarch is truly a martyr nation that should be commended.
What I’m saying is, 221 years from now, someone may look back at whatever is transpiring within the United States as a milestone, but I’m just not sure if the American populace knows what could await on the other side of this “revolution.”
Editor’s note: This post was postmarked Nov. 9. I blame Newman.
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So to take you back to one of my more confusing posts (here) the dinner for my grant-funded history class was Sunday, Nov. 7.
This meant, for the first time since 8th grade, I was going on a field trip!
This meant my classmates and I had to be in Davidson at 5 p.m. Because it’s a three-hour drive, this means we left at 2 p.m. Because the dinner agenda let out after 8, it pretty much meant my entire Sunday was shot.
Sunday..that day when you worry about Monday and relax a little bit and get yourself semi-pysched up to drag yourself through another week…yep mine was gone all for the sake of the rule of law from a historical perspective.
I was afraid I would end up in the professormobile…two of my professors were picking up a third from Duke…but luckily I hopped into the car with my peers.
Understand that this course I’m in is a 2 hour and 45 minute snooze fest every Wednesday and the job I appointed for myself was to keep everyone awake. This is how you end up seeing so many Boy Meets World references in my Tweets…it was such a long class.
But outside of that classroom, I realized the people in the seminar with me were actual real people! Imagine that…a three-hour car ride peppered with references to Disney Channel Original Movies (Cadet Kelly for example) and the recognition that we all were thinking the exact same thing during every second of every too-long class led me to thinking that this was the best waste of a Sunday ever.
But then we got to the dinner, where a lecturer was supposed to give us a special presentation and this is where I learned more about me and my future than any number of advisers and counselors could teach me.
First, the dinner was awesome. I drank more merlot than ever bef…well I drank a lot of merlot, especially considering I was across the table from my professor…though I found he’s also a bit of a wino too.
So I downed some wine to dull my senses before the lecture…it wasn’t hard since I hadn’t had anything all day…and then came the introduction.
This woman was a dynamo. Here’s her biodata from a symposium in 2006:
Leia Castañeda is a doctoral student in the SJD program at Harvard University. After completing her law degree at Ateneo de Manila University, achieving the highest score on the Philippines’ national bar exam, and working for a leading Manila law firm, she completed an LLM at Harvard University, specializing in legal history, before moving on to the SJD doctoral program there. She is the author of “The Origins of Philippine Judicial Review, 1900-1935,” Ateneo Law Journal (2001); “Making Sense of Marbury,” Ateneo Law Journal (2001); “From Merit to Disclosure Regulation: The Shifting Bases of Philippine Securities Law,” Ateneo Law Journal (1998); “Philippine Elections: The Right to Political Participation in an Elite Democracy,” Ateneo Law Journal (1997) and, “From Prerogative to Prohibition: Article 2(4) as Customary International Law in Nicaragua v. United States of America,” Ateneo Law Journal (1994).
But as she stepped up to the podium that she could barely see over, she took a deep breath and began her lecture/talk/discussion/essay that would forever set me apart from overachieving smart people.
She read the entire paper to us. She was lucky someone taught her to take the time to look up from her sheet every now and then to make faux-eye contact with the audience, because otherwise I’m sure everyone would have left.
Well, except for the Davidson people. It quickly became a drinking game for me…I took a sip of wine every time a Davidson person acted like a tool. (Their professor accounted for half of my glass). They laughed at things that weren’t funny, as historians do, and asked questions that were truly lectures with question marks at the end…as in:
I feel like the impact France had in the American Revolution is very much downplayed in more contemporary works, including textbooks at the high school level, as well as in more modern mediums ranging from film to television and this has somehow allowed the American psyche to forget the international relationship we have with the French, allowing an anti-French sentiment to settle in and displacing what could be our most trusted ally in Europe in the forefront of popular opinion in the states…don’t you?
That’s what happens when everyone wants to teach…you can’t have a question and answer session with history majors without getting a lashing from those who have stuck their noses in so many books they feel like they’ve actually been to the Phillippines…
But back to the speaker: she lost us. She had no control over the room and never ever tried to teach us anything…it was one, long sentence with periods thrown in for good measure (and so she could breathe).
So while I sat there taking sips every time my Davidson classmates giggled or spoke, I reminded myself what sets me apart from people like her.
Besides 1.25 grade points, world traveling experience, a few doctorates and a full-time job…I like to create connections with people.
When I tell stories, I’m almost forceful in how I try to make the listener connect with what I’m saying…and maybe, just maybe that will be enough to set me apart in the workforce.
So after the epiphany I immediately began to…you know what I did…I drank more wine and grabbed a couple extra bottles on my way out.
Riding high on our wine buzz, we piled back into the car and my new best friend Andrew plugged his iPod in.
This next portion of the story can best be explained through these links: Now 3 Now 5 Now 8
Because I know you’re curious now…they’re up to 36.
Interspersed between our audio trips down memory lane were “pit stops” that Andrew and I commissioned…mostly so we could buy whatever the cheapest alcoholic beverages were (this…twice…painful, but the best bang for our bucks) and chugging them in the parking lot before continuing the mobile dance party.
And so, to sum up, it’s the little things (cheap alcohol, music from way back) in life that get us through.
The song was originally two songs, one by Paul (the middle) and one by John (the bookends).
The two were meshed together, and this happy sounding song about day-to-day life was sandwiched between John’s sarcastic, dreary view of day-to-day life. It’s awesome.
One more note, and probably the most fascinating thing about this song: the weird part that separates the middle from the two bookends that sounds like an entire orchestra just doing whatever the hell they feel like is just that.
They marked the beginning and end notes on the music sheet and drew a squiggly line between the two. It was up to each individual musician how he or she arrived at the final note, so long as they hit it on time and on key.
And that, my friends, is how you shatter the world of music.
At this point, I’ve been growing my hair out long (as I consider it) since January 6, 2004. That was the first day since sometime in elementary school that I didn’t put product in my hair that made me look like the picture to the right.
Back then, I was as synonymous with that spiky hair look as I am now with my “golden locks”…something I’ve never had a problem with as it seems more people recognize you and remember your name when you have hair that makes you stand out.
So when I got to college and haircuts started seeming really expensive, my hair just kept growing and the attention just kept coming. I’ve had people stop me on Bourbon Street just to touch my hair, and among friends it’s become the subject eternal jokes, either as it makes me look or act feminine or whatever.
But now I’ve come to a crossroads and I’d like to put it to the Internetverse to help with a decision about my hair.
Typically, I wait until I’m mistaken for a girl or someone hits on me in a weird manner before I consider a haircut. Here’s exhibit A:
In 2006, I was in Philadelphia with my family where I approached an old fireman (55+) outside his station in Chinatown (House of DragonsFire Department) to ask if they sold T-shirts.
For those of you who don’t know, my dad is a firefighter in Goldsboro and likes to pick up T-shirts from obscure fire departments, so I typically grab him one anytime I’m somewhere cool. If there’s a fire department near you that has an interesting logo/location then let me know because he’s impossible to Christmas shop for. I’ll send you money/shipping and I’ll even put your name on the card alongside mine! Size XXL, please.
Anyway, I ask this middle-aged man if I could buy one of his T-shirts. He turned to me after helping his engineer back into the station and said: “Anything for you Fabio.”
He makes small talk, as firefighters do, about why I wanted the T-shirt and where my dad worked and such, and eventually I got the shirt, but as I was walking away, he stopped me again, saying “I’m serious, son. Don’t ever get thrown in jail in this city.”
That advice coming from an old man who was clearly impressed by my tresses was enough to get my hair cut that time. Encounters at On the Border in Cary and a Chick-fil-A in the CNN headquarters in Atlanta have also convinced me to cut the mane, but now I’m kind of looking for some advice:
Ordinarily, my mom and/or significant other are the only opinions that matter concerning my follicles, but since my mom has given up and I’m single, I thought I would at least solicit some views on it, even though it likely still won’t matter.
So…take my poll!
Just ignore the goofy smile...I was ice skating!
To be honest, I have an idea in mind and all I need is a little encouragement, so don’t worry about actually altering my plans…you can only confirm them.
That’s how my dad always referred to any non-family oriented holiday. This meant St. Patrick’s Day, New Year’s Day, Columbus Day…you name it…were all just days when mail delivery was questionable and some workplaces were closed.
It’s important to note that my dad is a fireman, so his schedule doesn’t take into account holidays. Idiots with dry, unwatered Christmas trees light them up with candles on Christmas Eve, Day and any other day of the holiday season, so in his line of work there isn’t really a day off.
It’s also important to note that he doesn’t drink, so these Cinco de Mayo-type excuses to get plastered on a weekday never appealed to him either, but I think more than anything he recognizes holidays where families come together. Christmas, Thanksgiving and a few family cookouts complete his recognized holidays, which brought me to the way I feel about my birthday.
It’s just another day.
I love birthdays, just not mine. It’s always so much fun to make a big deal about people on their birthdays and buy them presents and drinks, but on my birthday I can’t help but feel narcissistic.
People sing TO you…you can’t sing with them. I’m too self-aware to just let go and be pampered, so every year since I can remember I’ve found a way to get upset about my birthday.
I laid awake the night before my 16th, wondering if I would die. I was convinced God would never let me drive legally.
The night before my 18th, I laid awake knowing that any crimes I committed the next day could result in me being lethally injected…yeah it gets that dark.
The birthday, to me, is just a reminder of how far I haven’t come in so long. It comes with the territory of living within the same one-hour stretch of highway for your entire life…plus the knowledge that Maria Sharapova won Wimbledon at age 17.
But I did have one great birthday. Two, actually. One was my eighth. Cal Ripken Jr. was my favorite baseball player and I had seen him play just THREE games before he broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak in early September. His number, of course, was 8.
So my mom made a white, circular cake with orange baseball seams and an Orioles font 8 in the middle. Oh. My. Gosh. It was the best cake ever!
Fast forward 13 years to when I met Sonja Jones. Her birthday (March 12) is the best day ever, and if you don’t agree…well she doesn’t care.
Sonja learned of my disgust at my birthday and sought to change it. She arranged a day-long scavenger hunt that ended with my parents and all of my friends at a party complete with two replica cakes of my favorite birthday ever! (And, in a throwback to my Kate Nash post: Mouthwash defines this birthday in my head. Not because it was a Friday night, but because it was a Saturday night and I recall being drunk and singing it with the actual night tweaked in very loudly).
EDITOR’S NOTE: There was another Orioles cake produced by Kate Shefte, Ana Andruzzi and my friends at ‘Technician‘ last year on my birthday. Its significance was not lost on the author of this post, but the cake decorations were more coincidental than on his 21st birthday. Nevertheless, the cake should have been mentioned at this point, and the author failed to do so. It was delicious.
Of course 21 is a special birthday in the United States, but this one I set apart because of what it taught me: birthdays aren’t necessarily for those who celebrate them. Sometimes they’re for your friends.
Me with my two replica cakes courtesy of Sonja. Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Fowler. Saturday, Oct. 11, 2008.
Sometimes it gives them a chance to spend money on you. Sometimes it gives them an excuse to get you drunk. Sometimes it’s just a time when they take a Facebook post and use it to show you they still remember you and cherish whatever friendship you have or have lost.
That’s why I like birthdays so much…I can celebrate someone for no other reason than their existence.
That’s when I realized that the truly narcissistic thing about a birthday is when you don’t allow OTHERS to make a big deal about it. Saying “It’s just another day” or posting a ridiculously long rant on your blog about how much you don’t care for your birthday is the selfish move. Acting like the U.S. Government decided to place Columbus Day on your birthday simply because Ty Johnson Appreciation Day is difficult to fit in a calendar square allows your friends the opportunity to make your day special. Not embracing a birthday is like refusing to accept compliments…nobody feels good about it.
So while I still hesitate to tell people about my birthday, I’ve come to appreciate it for what it is: an excuse to live one day like you would like to live every day.
For me that means I’m doing a lot of illegal parking and pushing a lot of yellow lights. Woo hoo!
Apologies for the past two incredibly personal funeral/death posts, but, as you may imagine, I have had some unbelievably complicated thoughts I needed to put into words. Not sad. Not angry. Just…complicated.
As I walked past my chain-smoking relatives the irony hadn’t yet set in for me that the woman whose death had brought us all together had died at the age of 69 from complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease brought on undoubtedly from her constant cigarette smoking for the majority of her adult life.
That’s because I didn’t know what had actually led to her death, but it was also because I was trying to approach the entire funeral experience with tact. I wanted to be open-minded to the woman and family that never seemed to embrace me, if only for my mom’s sake.
But then I met my aunt/cousin Rulinda (see previous post for explanation) and she walked toward me smelling of smoke and tears. She hugged me and said as she was pulling away “Thank you for coming.”
And I think I gave her the most horrid face that I’ve ever made at a woman above the age of 50 (who wasn’t an educator), saying with my expression “Why the fuck wouldn’t I be here? This woman was related to me through blood. It’s a matter of respect and she and I were family.”
She was taken aback and I immediately regretted my expression. Sheepishly she said “I don’t know what to say, I just say what I think,” showing she knew exactly why I had scowled and, unbelievably to me (the asshole) that she was human.
I vowed to be more understanding from that moment on because, in truth, no one ever knows what to say at funerals. “It was a lovely ceremony.” “He/she looks great” referring to whoever’s in the casket. What? And that brought me back to the truth I’ve always adhered to concerning funerals: the fact that everyone ends up going to more funerals in their lifetime than they ever want to.
So I adjusted my tie and prepared to meet and speak with family members, because lo and behold, it turns out I am related to the deceased! My name was listed first as her grandchildren (nearly solving the mystery of whether I should follow legal or biological genealogy to know my place in the family), and I was expected to stand and receive friends and family.
And so began a parade of people that used to know me when I was this big. The fact that these people live less than an hour from where I’ve lived my entire life and haven’t seen me in more than 10 years only compounded my anger that these idiots were assumed relatives of mine. Some gems:
“Are you a rock star?” – from an uncle(?) who lives in Raleigh, no less. Clearly he wanted to say something about my hair, but he just choked.
“I haven’t seen you in a long time. We’ll have to do something about that.” – from a great uncle that used to visit us twice weekly when my granny was alive but since 1999 has visited my mom perhaps a dozen times. Oh and he married a woman who was accused of killing her husband, lives 10 minutes from my house and my mom changed his gauzes daily for him following his surgery in the early 2000s.
My response? “We just did.”
Then Rulinda comes by with a friend of hers to introduce to my sister. “This was her…granddaughter…I guess…”
What the fuck? You can’t read the program? Let’s just go with what’s printed there to keep things clean today…
So after hugs, handshakes and two trips to the bathroom to wash my hands because the idiot pastor insisted on shaking my hand after my first sanitation trip (even as I shoved my hands into my pockets and made it clear I didn’t want to shake) it was time for the ceremony at which the idiot pastor preceded to talk about how hard Faye worked for her family.
I laughed. Silently, of course, so I didn’t disturb those grieving, but it was hard to keep it quiet as I leafed through the program, complete with a bio indicating that Faye graduated in 1959…yes, a year before my mom was born. She began her work career as a high school graduate (no college) to begin saving enough money to provide for her other three daughters while my mom was being raised across town by her biological grandmother. (Though, as noted in my previous post, I have accepted this was for the best).
So my complications with that side of my family were compounded today though my ride back to Raleigh with Taylor let us both vent.
Big surprise: we were thinking the exact same thing at every stage of the funeral.
The closest we came to crying was when we imagined our other grandparent dying. We got pissed off every time someone brought up how long it had been since the last time we had been together. We talked about how disconcerting the entire affair was and which songs we wanted played at our funeral. (Friends: please assure this is played).
And so while the entire weekend has muddied my emotions about my mom’s side of the family and complicated further my understanding of my family tree, I came out of it with even more understanding about my connections within my immediate family: my sister is my best friend.
Last night, something happened that I’ve been thinking about since I was 11 years old: my mom’s mom died.
You may be wondering if she’s been battling an illness for the past 12 years. Nope, it was kind of sudden as far as I could tell. You’re probably also wondering why I didn’t call her my grandma, or some variation of that word, but that’s what has made this moment in my life something I’ve wondered about since 1999.
It all started in 1960 when my mom was born. Her biological mother, Faye, felt she was too young to raise a child, so my mom’s grandmother, Myrtle, (Don’t you love these old people names…) drove my mom home from the hospital. She completed adoption papers for my mom a few days later, and just like that my mom’s biological granny became her adopted mom while her biological mom became her sister legally.
All of this was kept from me when I was younger so I wouldn’t get so confused, but in 1999 when Myrtle died, my mom explained it all to me.
I had always called Faye “grandma” and had always called Myrtle “granny,” and also had a great aunt that we grandkids always called “granny Fox,” but in a year when I learned Faye was legally my aunt and granny and granny Fox died, I felt like a kid who had lost three grandparents in a single year.
But beyond that, Faye and her other daughters never had anything to do with my family except for Christmas, so I grew very resentful of my mom’s side of the family. I remember one time when I mentioned my birthday was the following week and Faye hadn’t even realized while she spent most of her time with my “cousins.”
And so it happened that I began to wonder what would happen when I learned what I heard yesterday about my aunt/grandma. Would I cry? Would it even matter to me? What emotions were going to take hold of me when I learned of her death?
It’s a morbid thought, I know, but with such a weird family history, it was something that came up in my mind countless times throughout adolescence.
And so when my mom delivered the news last night between Taylor’s volleyball match and my Wake Christian football game, I was speechless.
I had since come to terms with my grandma’s absence in my life thanks to my mom, who pointed out that within her side of the family (the portion that spent the most time with Faye) there were three teenage pregnancies out of wedlock, at least two jailbirds and exactly zero college ATTENDEES.
But with learning of Faye’s death, all I could feel was regret over the grudge I held for so many years.
I would have liked to have said goodbye, or at least to have seen her within the past five months, but it’s not so much about missed opportunities as much as I was just ashamed of adolescent Ty’s grudge against a family member.
Do you guys have any regrets concerning relatives or weird family tree stories?
The appeal for spicy foods had always eluded me, somehow.
I love to try different things, but anytime there’s a chili pepper logo or flame attached to a dish, I tend to stay away, preferring to err on the side of mild.
I just felt I had burned my tongue too many times on hot coffee to want to put it through pain on purpose, though I appreciated the flavors of hot stuff. Jalapenos sometimes would sometimes make an appearance in my diet, and sometimes I test ed myself with wings and hot sauces, but mostly just to assure myself again that spicy foods weren’t for me.
And then something happened. I was at Sammy’s for trivia one Tuesday night and Brent and Kate got the idea to order ten super-hot boneless wings. I can’t remember what Sammy’s calls their hottest…nuclear or inferno or something…I’ll find out sometime, but the idea was we would race. The first person to eat all three of their wings would eat the final, tenth wing to signify their winning of the contest.
And so I shoved hot, spicy chunks of meat down my throat as fast as possible. Of course I lost (Brent finished first, then Kate) after a lot of water and an unscheduled tearful lap around the restaurant in case I vomited, I celebrated quietly inside. I had eaten hot stuff on purpose and survived.
Then I received instructions to eat something spicy to help me get through a rough spot from Obi-Wan KelseySchnellobi. I never told him that he was insane and that I hated spicy food (mostly fearing another patriarchal tongue-lashing) and decided to push the thought of spicy food from my mind.
But it wasn’t long before peer pressure (from a very large man) had me staring down spiciness again.
I was interviewing Lamar Adams, a former Garner High standout and recent inductee into the Elon sports hall of fame, at Buffalo Brothers, a sports bar on Capital Boulevard. I had arrived late (as usual) and he had already ordered appetizers.
I got a beer (Sam Adams Summer Seasonal…ahh…) and we started talking about the NFL. Before long, there were eight jalapeno poppers in front of us and he TOLD me to eat.
I tried one and he made me eat another. Before I knew it, the waitress was asking if I needed another beer. I realized that if the spicy food continued, I would be too plastered to ask any questions.
Next came the hot wings…I was sure to eat slowly and drink even slower, but Adams had ordered 20 and was insistent that 10 of them were mine. They paled in spiciness to the Sammy’s wings and the jalapeno poppers, but it still kept me on my toes as the interview continued and I fought to appear manly before one of the Triangle’s all-time most feared defensive tackles.
So that was twice I conquered the sinister of spice, but there was another challenge to come. Outside of spicy mustard at The Flying Saucer and helping my mom with Asian Zing wings from Buffalo Wild Wings, my next heat against heat came Sunday when an old friend took me out for sushi.
I allowed her to order, since I knew nothing of sushi and only offered her distinct instructions not to order anything too spicy.
Sure enough, everything the waiter brought had spicy in its description. Spicy tuna, spicy mayo, spicy whatever…I don’t remember, but I decided to grin and bear it. Or, as Kelsey would put it, I “manned up.”
And that, my friends, was the greatest sushi experience I had ever had. The spices played off the tunas and seaweeds and whatever the hell else I ate perfectly.
It was a taste explosion, and that’s when I realized that despite of all of my liberal food explorations that had ranged from alligator to snails, I had built up one rule: nothing spicy – a rule that needed to be broken before understood that it was one meant to be broken.
With the final barrier broken, now I’m finally free to explore any foods that tickle my fancy, not matter that there’s a biohazard logo beside it. I won’t go overboard by any means, but it feels good to open up a menu with no encumbrances.
Was it the guiding force of Kelsey that led me to this awakening or just a series of peer-pressure-riddled situations? I don’t care either way, really. Just get me two glasses of water with whatever I order and let’s eat.
So, I’m not sure how other newspapers work, but at the ones I’ve worked at, producing content has always been a maniacal planning game.
You brainstorm story ideas, assign them knowing only 70% will be done, with 25% of those being dropped due to lame excuses and the other 5% coming in a day later than you needed it.
Occasionally I found myself playing a numbers game. I would assign several stories all due on one day like a month away. All of the writers were down with that deadline, since they had an entire month to screw it up, so I would end up with like seven stories all “coming in” on one magical day, even when I knew four would suffice along with whatever breaking news came up between assignment day and “coming in” day.
Then, when 70% came in I had enough to put together a decent paper because I had overbudgeted. It was a fun method I discovered through trial and error and the two times it worked, I had bonus stories rolling in for a week as that other 25% rolled in. I had excess content and life was good. Goddammit I love bonus stories.
But, as I said, that only happened like twice. Ever.
Most of the time, I spent my news career running on empty. No content. No “real” news. The knowledge that if the writer doesn’t hand in her story I’m going to have to write two to replace it along with the impending decision on whether I should write those two stories or just hop in my car and drive as far away from the office as I can…
And that’s how I feel like I’m living now: emptily. It seems like every day I wake up and I have just enough energy to get myself through classes, work, breathing and finally back to bed. If anything bad happens, like I don’t get a fork with my lunch or I remember some assignment I had forgotten about, I’m faced with a decision to either press on or run away. Recently, I’ve considered running. One moment can make me feel like my entire life has been derailed and I can’t conceive any way to get it back on track that doesn’t involve alcohol or sleep.
I know I’m over school, and this final semester will be both my easiest academic endeavor and my most challenging, but shouldn’t there be something else to get me through this besides wanting to graduate? I’ve never needed so much motivation before.
Life just feels more lonely than it used to and I really want a bonus story.
Ty W. Johnson 
